Another Volume to Add to My Reading List...

Michael Shermer's book The Believing Brain continues to receive positive reviews...

Shermer has written other books on this theme but The Believing Brain appears to be a summation of his thinking so far.  The ideas he expresses regarding ‘patternicity’ and ‘agenticity’, among others, may explain both our natural attraction to religion and our unnatural desire to do science. 

So many books, so little time...

First. Must. Finish. Paper. For. Master's.

New Moon

Pluto, everyone's favorite Kuiper Belt object, has yet another moon...

Discovered by most people's favorite space telescope - the Hubble, P4 joins Nix, Hydra, and Charon as moons of the former planet Pluto.  The Hubble picked out the new moon (which is estimated to be 8-21 miles in diameter) from four billion miles away.  There is every chance that our New Horizons robot explorer will discover more moons, or even rings, as it approaches and then passes through the Pluto-Charon system four years from now.  Stay tuned!

It is a Very Dangerous Thing to Believe in Nonsense

James Randi coined that phrase years ago...

When it comes to medicine skeptics have been trying to convince people of it ever since.  Asthma is scary and can be life-threatening.  Seems to me we would want to be sure to choose the very best treatment.

By way of Steven Novella here are the results of a study of asthma symptoms treated with three different methods - medical, placebo, and woo.  Above is the patients' subjective impression of the effectiveness of an albuterol inhaler, a placebo inhaler, acupuncture (technically "sham" acupuncture, but several studies have demonstrated that so-called sham works as well or better than real needles and with no negative side effects), and no treatment control.  Not much difference, except for the group that knew they had received no treatment.  If we stopped there we might guess that real medicine worked little better than placebo and acupuncture works about as well as either.  But wait, there's more...

David Gorksi's analysis of a study just published in NEJM goes on to demonstrate the actual measured effect of the different treatments, not just how the patient felt about them.  Bam!  Medicine works; placebo, acupuncture, and no treatment control come no where close.  Ain't science a wondrous thing?  Remember, if it's safe and effective it's not complimentary and alternative medicine, it's just medicine.

NOTE: This was a small study: 79 were screened, 46 randomized, 7 dropped out during the protocol, for a total of 39 patients.  Ideally, we'd want at least 100 participants, 100 in each group would be even better.  We'll have to wait on replication of the study elsewhere, which may be a challenge as negative studies are published much less often than those showing positive results (see "File Drawer Effect" or "Publication Bias").

Not Sure It Proves Anything

But it's pretty clever looking...

At least one wag noted that Saudi Arabia was not included.  Anyway, Calamities of Nature is a fun web comic.  Everyone with a sense of humor should check in from time to time.

Aaah, XKCD

It speaks for itself...

click for a version you won't need your readers to make out

XKCD is almost always worth a visit.  The Oatmeal is awesomely hilarious in its hilarious awesomeness this week too (not that I'm recommending you go there...nosireebobs!).  Please remember, XKCD and The Oatmeal are frequently NSFW.